Video surveillance is widely used. For example, suspect search systems that identify, track and/or monitor an individual use video surveillance or video monitoring. Video Content Analysis (VCA) or video analytics are known and used, e.g., for automatic analysis of a video stream to detect or identify points or items of interest. Video analytics is becoming more prevalent in a wide range of domains such as security, entertainment, healthcare and surveillance.
There is room for improvement in current video analytics systems in terms of the amount of data processing required for detection and identification. Also, particularly but not exclusively in the security field, it is desirable to facilitate, e.g. make easier, the input of data by human users relating to particular objects to be identified. Such objects may be persons or humans. For example it is desirable to capture data relating to a lost child as quickly as possible so that he or she can then be identified in video footage as quickly as possible. The same applies to other humans such as but not limited to terrorist suspects and kidnap victims. These humans are referred to in the following as particular humans or persons or target humans. There is often a need to identify them in images which depict many humans from which the particular or target human needs to be selected.